rilous journey along the wire rope swung
from precipice to precipice and over intervening gulfs was the only
condition of their continued survival. The post itself clung to the
extreme summit of the mountain as a bird's nest clings to the cranny
of rock in which it is built; while huts, devised to the exact and
difficult contours of the last crags and hidden as best they might be
from direct observation and fire from the enemy below, stood here
perched in places the reaching of which during the old days of peace
was thought a triumph of skill by the mountaineers. And all this
ingenuity, effort, and strain stood, it must be remembered, under the
conditions of war. The snow in the neighborhood of this aerie was
pitted with the shell that had been aimed so often and had failed to
reach this spot, and the men thus perilously clinging to an extreme
peak of bare rock up in the skies were clinging there subject to all
the perils of war added to the common perils of the feat they had
accomplished.

"Marvelous as it was, I saw here but one example of I know not how
many of the same kind with which the Italians have made secure the
whole mountain wall from the Brenta to the Isonzo and from Lake Garda
to the Orther and the Swiss frontier. Every little gap in that wall is
held. You find small posts of men, that must have their food and water
daily brought to them thus, slung by the wire; you find them crouched
upon the little dip where a collar of deep snow between bare rocks
marks some almost impassable passage of the hills that must yet be
held. You see a gun of 6 inches or even of 8 inches emplaced where,
had you been climbing for your pleasure, you would hardly have dared
to pitch the smallest tent. You hear the story of how the piece was
hoisted there by machinery first established upon the rock; of the
blasting for emplacement; of the accidents after which it was finally
emplaced; of the ingenious thought which has allowed for the chance of
recoil or of displacement; you have perhaps a month's journeying from
point to point of this sort over a matter of 250 miles."

A special correspondent of the London "Times" describes the fighting
around Monte Pasubio in the Trentino, which has already been mentioned
in the preceding pages, as follows:

"When the tide of the Austrian invasion rolled back at the end of
June, 1916, its margin became fixed on the crest of the Pasubio, an
enormous and irregular group of mountains, of which